THE SOVIET WAY WITH THE CRIMINAL 213
Union put crimes against the social order above all
other categories of offence.
To make the country safe for the socialist experi-
ment which the Kremlin leaders are carrying on is the
chief aim of the Soviet criminal code. Against those
interfering or attempting to interfere with the plans
and programmes of the Communist party, which is the
government of Russia, the Soviet code knows no limit
to its severity. Thus capital punishment is personally
condemned by all Communist leaders; they consider
its application barbarous and degrading. Yet they em-
ploy the death penalty against their political enemies,
against their own comrades, and even against parent
or brother, when the latter have proved themselves
dangerous opponents of the Communist regime. When
dealing with "enemies of the revolution" they declare
capital punishment to be a necessary "temporary meas-
ure." In the same spirit they resort to the so-called
class approach in the treatment of political prisoners
assigned to the various penal colonies and institutions.
The liberality, consideration and even sympathy
which the Soviet government lavishes upon the thief,
the robber, the murderer, if he comes from the for-
merly downtrodden classes, do not extend to "class
offenders." The man serving a sentence for "specula-
tion" which is another term for private trading, the
"kulak," or rich peasant who has resisted the govern-
ment's collectivization policy, the intellectual who has
been derelict in the performance of his professional